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Monday, January 25, 2016

Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin’s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google’s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him. An Ann Arbor IT Services company is following this story closely.

They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction — that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun’s power — before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name.

“I’m Larry Page,” the man said. He realized he had been talking to Google’s billionaire co-founder and chief executive.

“He didn’t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn’t be talking to me or ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’” Mr. Chase said. “We just talked.”

Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors. A Cuyahoga County IT Services company delivers wireless network installations that help manufacturing plants and industrial facilities do more with less.

But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google’s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.

Mr. Page is hardly the first Silicon Valley chief with a case of intellectual wanderlust, but unlike most of his peers, he has invested far beyond his company’s core business and in many ways has made it a reflection of his personal fascinations.

He intends to push even further with Alphabet, a holding company that separates Google’s various cash-rich advertising businesses from the list of speculative projects like self-driving cars that capture the imagination but do not make much money. Alphabet companies and investments span disciplines from biotechnology to energy generation to space travel to artificial intelligence to urban planning. Google SEO Company has a diverse knowledge base of marketing and advertising that provides a unique perspective on the search engine marketing industry.

Investors will get a good look at the scope of those ambitions on Feb. 1, when the company, in its fourth-quarter earnings report, will disclose for the first time the costs and income of the collection of projects outside of Google’s core business.

As chief executive of Alphabet, Mr. Page is tasked with figuring how to spin Google’s billions in advertising profits into new companies and industries. When he announced the reorganization last summer, he said that he and Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder, would do this by finding new people and technologies to invest in, while at the same time slimming down Google — now called Google Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet — so their leaders would have more autonomy.

“In general, our model is to have a strong C.E.O. who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to investors. He said that he and Mr. Brin would be responsible for picking those chief executives, monitoring their progress and determining their pay. A Boston employment lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of labor and employment law.

Google’s day-to-day management was left to Sundar Pichai, the company’s new chief executive. His job will not be about preventing cancer or launching rocket ships, but to keep Google’s advertising machine humming, to keep innovating in emerging areas like machine learning and virtual reality — all while steering the company through a thicket of regulatory troubles that could drag on for years.

Mr. Page’s new role is part talent scout and part technology visionary. He still has to find the chief executives of many of the other Alphabet businesses.

And he has said on several occasions that he spends a good deal of time researching new technologies, focusing on what kind of financial or logistic hurdles stand in the way of them being invented or carried out.

His presence at technology events, while just a sliver of his time, is indicative of a giant idea-scouting mission that has in some sense been going on for years but is now Mr. Page’s main job.

In the investor letter, he put it this way: “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”

An Interest in Cool Things

Mr. Page has always had a wide range of interests. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he worked on solar cars, music synthesizers and once proposed that the school build a tram through campus. He arrived at Stanford’s computer science doctorate program in 1995, and had a list of initial research ideas, including self-driving cars and using the web’s many hyperlinks to improve Internet search. His thesis adviser, Terry Winograd, steered him toward search. A custom home builder in Tampa FL provides one-stop shopping for the design and construction of your new home.

“Even before he came to Stanford he was interested in cool technical things that could be done,” Mr. Winograd said. “What makes something interesting for him is a big technical challenge. It’s not so much where it’s headed but what the ride is like.”

Inside Google, Mr. Page is known for asking a lot of questions about how people do their jobs and challenging their assumptions about why things are as they are. In an interview at the Fortune Global Forum last year, Mr. Page said he enjoyed talking to people who ran the company’s data centers.

“I ask them, like, ‘How does the transformer work?’ ‘How does the power come in?’ ‘What do we pay for that?’” he said. “And I’m thinking about it kind of both as an entrepreneur and as a business person. And I’m thinking ‘What are those opportunities?’”

Another question he likes to ask: “Why can’t this be bigger?”

Mr. Page declined multiple requests for comment, and many of the people who spoke about him requested anonymity because they were not supposed to talk about internal company matters.

Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?

But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.

Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.

It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group. An Albany employment lawyer focuses on a wide range of employment law matters.

Such disputes are a big reason Mr. Page had been shedding managerial duties and delegating the bulk of his product oversight to Mr. Pichai, these people said. In a 2014 memo to the company announcing Mr. Pichai’s promotion to product chief, Mr. Page said the move would allow him to “focus on the bigger picture” at Google and have more time to get the company’s next generation of big bets off the ground.

People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.

Given that he is worth in the neighborhood of $40 billion and created the world’s most famous website, Mr. Page has the tendency to attract a crowd when he attends technology events. At last year’s Darpa Robotics Challenge, he was trailed closely by a handler who at times acted as a buffer between Mr. Page and would-be cellphone photographers. That commotion could annoy anyone, but it is particularly troubling for Mr. Page, who, because of damaged vocal cords, speaks just above a whisper and sometimes uses a microphone in small meetings.

At home in Palo Alto, Mr. Page tries to have the most normal life possible, driving his children to school or taking his family to local street fairs, according to people who know him or have seen him at such events.

And at Google, even events that are decidedly not normal aspire to a kind of casualness. Take the Camp, an exclusive and secretive event that Google holds at a resort in Sicily and where invitees have included Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Tory Burch, the fashion designer.

One attendee, who asked to remain anonymous because guests were not supposed to discuss the gathering, recalls being surprised by how much time Mr. Page spent with his children.

In public remarks, Mr. Page has said how important his father, Carl V. Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University who died in 1996, was to his choice of career.

“My dad was really interested in technology,” Mr. Page said at Google I/O in 2013, the last time he took the stage at the event. “He actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference. And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference, one of the few times I’ve seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference, and that was me.”

People who work with Mr. Page or have spoken with him at conferences say he tries his best to blend in, and, for the most part, the smaller groups of handpicked attendees at Google’s academic and science gatherings, tend to treat him like a peer.

The scope of his curiosity was apparent at Sci Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only conference that is sponsored by Google, O’Reilly Media and Digital Science.

The largely unstructured “unconference” begins when each of its attendees — an eclectic batch of astronomers, psychologists, physicists and others — write something that interests them on a small card and then paste it to a communal wall. Those notes become the basis for breakout talks on topics like scientific ethics or artificial intelligence.

The last conference was held during a weekend in June on Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, and Mr. Page was there for most of it. He did not host or give a speech, but mingled and went to talks, just like everyone else. That impressed investors and computer scientists who did not expect to see so much of him, but researchers who had come from outside Silicon Valley barely noticed.

“I have a vague memory that some founder type person was walking through the crowd,” said Josh Peek, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Another benefit of these gatherings for the reserved Mr. Page is that they are mostly closed to the news media.

A Forward Thinker

When Mr. Page does talk in public, he tends to focus on optimistic pronouncements about the future and Google’s desire to help humanity. Asked about current issues, like how mobile apps are challenging the web or how ad blockers are affecting Google’s business, he tends to dismiss it with something like, “People have been talking about that for a long time.”

Lately, he has talked more about his belief that for-profit companies can be a force for social good and change. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Page said that instead of a nonprofit or philanthropic organization, he would rather leave his money to an entrepreneur like Mr. Musk.

Of course, for every statement Mr. Page makes about Alphabet’s technocorporate benevolence, you can find many competitors and privacy advocates holding their noses in disgust. Technology companies like Yelp have accused the company of acting like a brutal monopolist that is using the dominance of its search engine to steer consumers toward Google services, even if that means giving the customers inferior information.

Financially speaking, Mr. Page is leaving his chief executive job at Google at a time when things could not be better. The company’s revenue continues to grow about 20 percent a year, an impressive figure for any business, but particularly so for one that is on pace to generate approximately $60 billion this year.

In fact, the company’s main business issue seems to be that it is doing too well. Google is facing antitrust charges in Europe, along with investigations in Europe and the United States. Those issues are now mostly Mr. Pichai’s to worry about, as Mr. Page is out looking for the next big thing.

It is hard to imagine how even the most ambitious person could hope to revolutionize so many industries. And Mr. Page, no matter how smart, cannot possibly be an expert in every area Alphabet wants to touch.

His method is not overly technical. Instead, he tends to focus on how to make a sizable business out of whatever problem this or that technology might solve. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.

She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.

“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”

Dr. Dewan said Mr. Page even gave her an idea for a new market opportunity that she had not thought of. Asked to be more specific, she refused. The idea was too good to share.

Yahoo is reported to have rejected "several" offers to take over its core internet business, Reuters reported on Thursday.

It said the potential buyers included a private-equity firm, citing three anonymous sources.

The report added that Yahoo will most likely announce its next strategic steps only after its earnings, which is scheduled for February 2.

One of the sources told Reuters that Yahoo will present its future plan during the earnings call in order to "gauge shareholder reaction." A Google SEO Company provides consulting services and expert search engine optimization guidance for leading companies.

The last time Yahoo rebuffed offers to buy its core business was in December, before the board meeting in which the company decided not to spin off its Alibaba assets, the report said. Yahoo never launched a formal sales process.

In December, Yahoo reversed its plan to spin off its holdings in Asian assets, announcing that it would explore a spin-off of its core business instead. Yahoo's chairman, Maynard Webb, said it's not looking to sell the core business, although he indicated that the company would listen to offers. A Philadelphia finance lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.

That prompted activist investor Starboard to send a letter to Yahoo's board, demanding a sale of its core business and a complete overhaul of management.

Yahoo's growth has stalled in recent years, and investors are increasingly growing impatient with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's performance. Excluding Yahoo's stake in its Asian assets, investors are essentially giving zero value to Yahoo's core business, which include its online content and advertising units.

According to Business Insider's Biz Carson, Yahoo is preparing to cut 10% or more of its workforce this month, as the company preps for a major organizational shake-up. A Poughkeepsie employment lawyer has experience defending clients in employment related matters.

Google Inc. is paying Apple Inc. a hefty fee to keep its search bar on the iPhone.

Apple received $1 billion from its rival in 2014, according to a transcript of court proceedings from Oracle Corp.’s copyright lawsuit against Google. The search engine giant has an agreement with Apple that gives the iPhone maker a percentage of the revenue Google generates through the Apple device, an attorney for Oracle said at a Jan. 14 hearing in federal court. Google SEO Company offers organic search engine optimization techniques that secure and maintain premium keyword positions in the organic search results.

Rumors about how much Google pays Apple to be on the iPhone have circulated for years, but the companies have never publicly disclosed it. Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple, and Google spokesman Aaron Stein both declined to comment on the information disclosed in court.

The revenue-sharing agreement reveals the lengths Google must go to keep people using its search tool on mobile devices. It also shows how Apple benefits financially from Google’s advertising-based business model that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has criticized as an intrusion of privacy. An Ann Arbor IT services company is the industry leader in firewalls, switches, and wireless cloud managed IT services.

Oracle has been fighting Google since 2010 over claims that the search engine company used its Java software without paying for it to develop Android. The showdown has returned to U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco after a pit stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, where Google lost a bid to derail the case. The damages Oracle now seeks may exceed $1 billion since it expanded its claims to cover newer Android versions.34 Percent

Annette Hurst, the Oracle attorney who disclosed details of the Google-Apple agreement at last week’s court hearing, said a Google witness questioned during pretrial information said that “at one point in time the revenue share was 34 percent.” It wasn’t clear from the transcript whether that percentage is the amount of revenue kept by Google or paid to Apple. A Las Vegas finance lawyer is following this story closely.

An attorney for Google objected to the information being disclosed and attempted to have the judge strike the mention of 34 percent from the record.

“That percentage just stated, that should be sealed,” lawyer Robert Van Nest said, according to the transcript. “We are talking hypotheticals here. That’s not a publicly known number.”

The magistrate judge presiding over the hearing later refused Google’s request to block the sensitive information in the transcript from public review. Google then asked Alsup to seal and redact the transcript, saying the disclosure could severely affect its ability to negotiate similar agreements with other companies. Apple joined Google’s request in a separate filing.

‘Highly Sensitive’

“The specific financial terms of Google’s agreement with Apple are highly sensitive to both Google and Apple,” Google said in its Jan. 20 filing. “Both Apple and Google have always treated this information as extremely confidential.” A Denver corporate lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.

The transcript vanished without a trace from electronic court records at about 3 p.m. Pacific standard time with no indication that the court ruled on Google’s request to seal it.

The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., 10-cv-03561, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

Thursday, January 14, 2016

A yellow billboard. No text. Just a small, faceless ghost at the center.

For months, people have encountered this sight along roads nationwide, leaving those not in the know curious or confused.

In Los Angeles, you might've caught it heading toward Los Angeles International Airport on Century Boulevard. Is it unfinished? Some Halloween prank?

Turn to a kid, and no doubt, you'll get filled in: It's the logo for Snapchat, the smartphone app that teens and young adults use to share millions of photos and videos each day. An Ann Arbor IT services company delivers hands-on, results oriented technology solutions.

Snapchat's explanation for the mysterious billboards is as vague as the ads: "Fun and awareness."

The awareness part might be crucial to the growth prospects for Snapchat, based in Venice. The kids already know Snapchat. Young adults, too: Six in 10 people ages 13 to 35 in the U.S. use Snapchat.

It's nowhere close to popular among the over-35 crowd. But there are signs that's changing. The raw numbers are small so far, but Snapchat use among older adults is growing fast.

Over the last year in the U.S., Snapchat added 25-to-34-year-old users (103%) and older-than-35 users (84%) faster than 18-to-24-year-old users (56%), according to measurement firm Comscore. Snapchat's own data now peg 12% of its nearly 50 million daily users in the U.S. as 35 to 54.

The growth is led by parents and siblings looking to stay in touch with younger family members, experts said. Snapchat investor Jeremy Liew also noted at a fall conference that he's seen pickup among parents of Snapchat users. A Jacksonville corporate lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of corporate law.

"Almost everyone I talk to, it's their niece that shows them Snapchat," said Kevin Del Rosario, associate director of social at the consulting firm Huge Inc. "Then they start seeing how it works."

Older consumers have higher incomes, attractive to advertisers, said Enrique Velasco-Castillo, senior analyst at research firm Analysys Mason. Ads are integral to Snapchat's revenue strategy, a work in progress. Though one of the world's most highly valued start-ups, it's far from earning profits.

Still, technology trends are in Snapchat's favor, as apps become more of a time suck. People in the U.S. spent about 37 hours a month on their smartphones in 2014, up more than 14 hours from two years earlier, according to Nielsen. Which group spent the most time? People aged 35 to 44, at more than 43 hours a month. Change the dynamics of your enterprise by incorporating organic SEO services.

They're engaging more with the most popular apps, especially ones that provide "entertainment." Snapchat fits the description. Velasco-Castillo said Snapchat is more visual, "spontaneous, candid and — most importantly — immediate" than other chat options.

Whether the billboards in Seattle, Oakland and Tampa, Fla., and dozens of other cities deserve credit for spurring downloads among older people isn't clear, but Snapchat's decision to market itself underscores ambitions to become a household name. Just before New Year's Eve, Snapchat also stuck a huge poker-chip-shaped banner on the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas.

"If they want to compete at the highest levels with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, they can't just appeal to a younger crowd," said Brian Blau, a consumer technology analyst at research firm Gartner. "That younger crowd carries a lot of purchasing power — it's a great demographic. But that limits Snapchat, if that's all they ever are."

The billboards started New Year's Eve 2014 in Times Square. A drab old-school billboard in a sea of digital signs looked cool, and Snapchat executives decided to do more.

Snapchat declined to explain why it made the billboards mysterious. Marketing experts call it clever: If people passing by in a car know about Snapchat, chances are they could offer a better sales pitch than a roadside tag line. The oddity of the billboard got so many people talking in Pennsylvania that a media outlet in Harrisburg wrote a story explaining Snapchat, resulting in the article being shared hundreds of times across social media.

Jason Morgan, who tracks billboards for Dailybillboardblog.com, said data about visitors to his website showed people searched Google for "yellow ghost billboard" as the ads appeared in their cities.

Elsewhere, National Basketball Assn. teams put Snapchat's ghost logo around their arenas to encourage fans to follow official accounts. People have changed their Twitter profile picture to a version of the ghost logo that when scanned on Snapchat links to that person's Snapchat user page.

Going mainstream increases the risk of teenagers seeking something fresher. But Facebook has managed to erect a huge business despite similar concerns. An Augusta business lawyer is following this story closely.

Facebook's status as the most important app for U.S. teenagers has fallen to 15% from about 50% three years ago, according to Piper Jaffray survey data. (Snapchat recently reached 19%, up from 13% early last year.) But revenue continues to climb because it has become a staple for about 3 in 4 U.S. adults with Internet access; even 64% of people age 50 to 65 use it, according to Pew Research Center.

To be sure, Facebook initially was aimed at college students, an older crowd. Snapchat is available only on mobile devices and emerged at high schools first, meaning over-35 audience growth should be tougher for 4-year-old Snapchat, Blau said.

"Facebook was the destination you had to be to connect with people online," he said. "I clicked 'find my friends' on Snapchat, and I didn't find a single one."

But older adopters exist, like Denise Cortes, 43. The freelance artist and writer in Riverside has six children, including three teenagers who downloaded Snapchat two years ago. She swore off the app as a "kid's thing" until last spring.

Her son gave her a tutorial, and now it's her top app. Fifty of her friends have Snapchat. Even her husband just got it, to keep tabs on her.

Cortes likes that she can share photos or videos of her messy house or her unadorned self on Snapchat because the messages disappear and her network is small. The reduced pressure to look your best — compared to on Facebook and Instagram — also drew teens to Snapchat.

"With Snapchat, all bets are off," Cortes said.

But feeling closer to family tops all Snapchat perks, she said. Her brother's seconds-long video posts on Snapchat from Manhattan reveal what he's wearing and the tone of his voice. She can hear his feet crunching fall leaves.

"That's a connection I can't get from Facebook," she said.

Cortes watches over her children too; she doesn't condone nudity or drug references, for example.

She's considering how Snapchat can help her business because she relies on getting her name known to garner more work. Even if self-promotion doesn't work, she's not about to quit: It's just too fun, she says.

Snapchat hasn't said whether it would tweak features to better cater to people in their 30s and older. Analysts doubt Snapchat would shed its confusing user interface, which leaves many features known to only power users. But more tools could arrive for varied age groups. A Cuyahoga County IT services company delivers Cisco Meraki wireless networking solutions that help your business meet the growing demands of today's global marketplace.

For instance, Snapchat promotes feeds from about 15 media companies, including CNN and ESPN. But it could do more to bring in publications with topics geared toward older workers. A partnership launched last week with the Wall Street Journal is one opportunity.

Others say they'd like to see more Live Stories, themed videos on Snapchat showing, for example, New Year's Eve celebrations. Older consumers could prefer topics where posts mostly come from people their own age.

Business reasons also are fueling other types of interest in Snapchat. New York magazine reported that Wall Street bankers like Snapchat's self-destructing chat feature. University admissions officers have used it as a recruiting tool. Marketers, of course, are trying it.

Jeremy Simon of the marketing agency Attention Global said he had trouble convincing marketing chiefs to download Snapchat a year ago. But in the last few months, client usage of Snapchat soared.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO — Marissa Mayer, the glamorous, geeky Google executive hired to turn around Yahoo in 2012, used to inspire hope in Yahoo’s work force just by visiting the cafeteria for ice cream and mingling.

Now, morale has sunk so low that some employees refer to Ms. Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, as “Evita” — an allusion to Eva Peron, the former first lady of Argentina whose outsize ego and climb to power and wealth were chronicled in the musical of that name.

Ms. Mayer is about to make herself even less popular with Yahoo’s nearly 11,000 employees. Faced with the failure of her efforts to reignite growth at the 22-year-old Silicon Valley company, she is now turning to the opposite strategy: cutting. As some investors press Yahoo to fire her, Ms. Mayer is crafting a last-ditch plan to streamline the company — including significant layoffs — that is expected to be announced before month’s end. A Memphis employee rights lawyer is reviewing the details of this story.

While many Yahoo workers are keeping their heads down, just doing their jobs, others have lost faith in Ms. Mayer’s leadership, according to conversations with more than 15 current and former employees from all levels of the company, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continuing ties to Yahoo and its strict policy against leaks.

More than a third of the company’s work force has left in the last year, say people familiar with the data. Worried about the brain drain, Ms. Mayer has been approving hefty retention packages — in some cases, millions of dollars — to persuade people to reject job offers from other companies. But those bonuses have had the side effect of creating resentment among other Yahoo employees who have stayed loyal and not sought jobs elsewhere.

Only 34 percent of employees believe that Yahoo’s prospects are improving, according to surveys conducted by Glassdoor, a firm that collects data on jobs and employers. That compares with 61 percent who are optimistic at Twitter, another troubled tech company, and 77 percent who see a bright future at Google, Ms. Mayer’s former employer. A Boston employment lawyer is following this story closely.

“Basically, it shows employees losing faith in Marissa Mayer and Yahoo,” said Scott Dobroski, a spokesman for Glassdoor who analyzed the data.

Yahoo declined to comment on employee morale but said that turnover is normal at Silicon Valley companies. While thousands of people have left, many others have been hired, offsetting some of the losses. “We’re still hiring, and our application numbers are strong,” Yahoo said in a statement.

One Yahoo employee who was interviewed said she was praying to be laid off so she could collect a severance payment and move on with her life. Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company.

“Brands are important out here for employers,” said Nick Parham, a career coach in San Francisco who has had several Yahoo clients. “They are going to look harder at people from Facebook and Salesforce, companies that have winning strategies.”

Employees’ faith in Ms. Mayer began crumbling in earnest in August 2014, when Yahoo embarked on a series of stealth layoffs, current and former insiders said. For months, managers called in a handful of employees each week and fired them. No one knew who would be next, and the constant fear paralyzed the company, according to people who watched the process. A Memphis wrongful termination lawyer is following this story closely.

Last March, Ms. Mayer told the staff at an all-hands meeting that the bloodletting was finally over. Shortly thereafter, she changed her mind and demanded more cuts. All told, about 1,100 people lost their jobs in the layoffs.

Contributing to the employees’ disenchantment were Ms. Mayer’s protracted deliberations over a corporate reorganization last year that led to the departure of several key lieutenants and broke up the much-ballyhooed mobile team, prompting many mobile engineers to seek other jobs.

Hanging over everything has been the uncertainty about the company’s plan to spin off its $26 billion stake in Alibaba, which was announced a year ago but was abandoned last month by the company’s board of directors because of tax concerns. A Los Angeles finance lawyer represents clients in asset sales, debt and equity finance claims, and in financial restructuring cases.

For all of Yahoo’s problems, many of its employees still have a deep affection for the company, whose products were the gateway to the Internet for a generation of web users and still remain popular, with more than 1 billion monthly visitors.

“We all want to make as much impact as we can and leverage Yahoo’s existing strengths,” said Austin Shoemaker, who now manages Yahoo’s instant-messaging efforts after his start-up, Cooliris, was acquired by Yahoo in 2014.

The company has long struggled to overcome two big challenges: the industrywide drop in display advertising that has traditionally been its primary revenue source and the distraction inherent in trying to excel at many different things, from news and fantasy sports to web searches and email.

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president for communications products, said that Ms. Mayer had always told people that it would take three to five years for the company’s turnaround efforts to show results.

“It would be nice to give Yahoo one thing to magically save the company overnight,” Mr. Bonforte said in an interview last month, adding that the idea was unrealistic. Ms. Mayer has invested in technology, he said, “to give Yahoo a chance to be incredibly integral to this next phase of where the Internet is going.”

Mr. Bonforte’s team, for example, has spent much of the last two years rebuilding Yahoo’s email and instant-messaging services from the ground up, focusing on features such as better searches in email and the ability to unsend or delete an instant message at any time. While those reworked products garnered a modest reception from users, he said the technology was now in place for faster innovation. Organic Search Marketing brings exposure to your website and leads to increased page views per website visitor, more time spent on your site by users, and higher conversion rates especially with phone calls and email inquiries.

He said that Ms. Mayer was the best boss he had ever had, but acknowledged some truth in the common criticism that she was tightfisted with praise and sometimes displayed a harshness that could be demoralizing.

“Marissa is the type of boss that makes you feel like you’re disappointing her at all times, so I always feel like I’m on the verge of being fired,” said Mr. Bonforte, who is widely respected for both his talent and his irreverence. “It’s never, ‘Way to go, Jeff!’ ”

Mr. Bonforte said he was proud of Yahoo and his team and had no plans to leave. But other top executives have recently departed for other opportunities, including Kathy Savitt, the architect of the video strategy that Ms. Mayer has now dropped, and Jackie Reses, who led the company’s acquisitions and managed its relationship with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company in which Yahoo holds a 15 percent stake.

The latest loss was Prashant Fuloria, whose company, Flurry, was sold to Yahoo in 2014. Ms. Mayer put him in charge of Yahoo’s critical advertising technology last January, but he quit in December to work on start-up ideas. A Memphis employment lawyer is following this story closely.

Ms. Mayer has put on a brave face despite all the turmoil.

At Yahoo’s annual holiday party, a Roaring Twenties-themed affair held Dec. 4 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, she sat in a chair — visibly pregnant with twin daughters who were born the next week — and posed for photos with employees. “She was kind of like Santa Claus,” said one fan who waited in line for a picture.

Just before the party, Ms. Mayer and the company’s other directors decided to stop pursuing the original Alibaba spinoff plan and instead slim down and spin off Yahoo’s core business.

Now, everyone is waiting for details of that plan, which Ms. Mayer has promised to outline by the time the company reports its fourth-quarter financial results this month.

That is unlikely to soothe the unrest at Yahoo, however, since activist investors like the Starboard Value hedge fund are pushing for new management, a new board and a new strategy, including a possible sale of Yahoo’s operating businesses. A Cincinnati IT services company provides wireless network design, planning, implementation, IT system management, and networking equipment.

Mr. Bonforte said those outside forces were beyond his control.

“That’s the problem with a turnaround,” he said. “The world gets to decide, ‘Time’s up.’ ”

On Wednesday, Marissa Mayer announced a new plan for the future of Yahoo. On Thursday, she gave gave birth to identical twin girls.

The Yahoo CEO tweeted that she, the twins and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are "doing great."
On her Tumblr blog, Mayer said the twins were born early Thursday morning. A Phoenix corporate lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of corporate law.

"Thanks to everyone for all of the support and well wishes throughout my pregnancy," she posted.
She did not yet reveal the twins' names.

Zack and I are excited to announce that our identical twin girls were born early this morning. Our whole family is doing great! @zackbogue
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) December 10, 2015

A Yahoo spokeswoman said in a statement the Mayer-Bogue family is "beyond thrilled."
"We couldn't be happier for them!" she said.

Mayer and Bogue also have a son, Macallister, who is 3 years old. Mayer revealed that she was pregnant with Macallister on the day she accepted the Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) job in July 2012.

The Yahoo CEO was criticized by maternity leave advocates for returning to work quickly after giving birth to her son. Mayer had a nursery installed close to her desk so she could work and help to take care of her child without going back and forth from her office. A Memphis employment lawyer is reviewing the details of this story.

When Mayer announced in August that she was expecting twins, she said she planned on taking a similar tactic.

"Since my pregnancy has been healthy and uncomplicated and since this is a unique time in Yahoo's transformation, I plan to approach the pregnancy and delivery as I did with my son three years ago, taking limited time away and working throughout," Mayer said in a Tumblr post.

Mayer stuck to that promise, appearing on a conference call with investors and on CNBC Wednesday morning to discuss Yahoo's plans to keep the company's lucrative Alibaba stake and spin off its core Internet business into a new company. An Ann Arbor IT services company provides networking solutions that help your business meet the growing demands of today's global marketplace.

CNBC anchor David Faber offered Mayer well-wishes, which she thanked him for. She said during the interview that she was expecting the twins to arrive "later this month."

"There's always a lot to do on both the homefront and the workfront," Mayer said.

Mayer's twins were born just two weeks after Facebook (FB, Tech30) CEO Mark Zuckerberg's wife Priscilla Chan gave birth to the couple's first child -- a daughter named Maxima.

Friday, January 08, 2016

Next Wednesday, YouTube will begin selling $9.99-a-month subscriptions that will allow U.S. customers to watch almost everything without ads, to download videos for viewing offline and to keep content playing on a smartphone or tablet even when using a different app.

But those widely requested features aren't all that subscribers will get. The service, called YouTube Red, offers access to highly produced original shows and movies that can't be found anywhere else. Google Play streaming music will be included too. Search engine optimization provides exposure for your business.

YouTube Red is intended to turn the enormously popular Google-owned company into a profit maker, not a money loser.

Ad revenue isn't enough to meet the enormous expenses of serving billions of videos every day — even when most videos are supplied by users for free. YouTube could generate nearly $950 million annually in new revenue if just 5% of U.S. users signed up for the subscription, UBS analysts estimate. A Roseland finance lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in corporate finance.

Red marks the beginning of "a long journey," according to YouTube.

Matthew Glotzbach, the company's vice president of product management, said, "By no means would we expect to jump to tens or hundreds of millions of paying users overnight," but there should be "strong demand" from the start.

Financial analysts who follow Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, say YouTube could become a major profit engine. But rivals, including Facebook, Snapchat and Vimeo, are threatening its potential by stealing away both video makers and viewing time.

Growth of YouTube's net ad revenue in the U.S. is expected to slow rapidly over the next three years, the market research company EMarketer said in August. According to EMarketer's calculations, worldwide net revenue will be $4.3 billion in 2015, up 41% from last year.

Yet to be determined is how the subscription model will affect an expanding generation of YouTube stars, many of whom began by filming videos in their bedrooms and elsewhere, cracking jokes, dancing and talking to the camera about everything from fashion to video games. They uploaded the videos to YouTube, attracting advertising sponsors, and, in a few cases, becoming millionaires in the process.

YouTube often places several ads on the same page as a video, and attracting millions of viewers has meant steady, growing income for video makers, who get 55% of ad revenue.

It's unclear how the commercial-free subscription will affect ad income, though YouTube Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl said the "vast majority" of YouTube's subscription revenue will go to the YouTube Red content creators. Certainly, some creators will lose out on money from heavy viewers who might encounter lots of ads or be willing to pay more than $10 a month for a subscription. A Tampa business lawyer is following this story closely.

With Red, YouTube also plans to create a new, subscriber-only slate of original shows and movies for its most popular (and potentially popular) video stars. The selected creators will be gambling that slicker content will broaden their viewership and fatten their paychecks.

"Bigger productions cost a lot more money," said Joey Graceffa, a YouTube star who has amassed more than 5.2 million subscribers on his channel. "There's no way you'll be able to make your money back just by posting it online. YouTube Red is an opportunity where we as creators get to make higher quality content for our audience."

Graceffa's untitled reality murder mystery series is one of a handful of new exclusive productions being offered on YouTube Red. The new content, which will begin rolling out in January, will also include highly produced content from YouTubers Lilly Singh, The Fine Bros, PewDiePie and others.

At a Wednesday news conference held at the San Bruno's company 41,000-square-foot video production facility in Playa Vista, Kyncl emphasized that YouTube and YouTube Red have the ability to showcase a wide variety of content. For more information on the power of Organic SEO, click here.

"We realized what we should be doing is we should be amplifying and funding efforts of these incredibly talented people," Kyncl told reporters. "We have a built-in talent system, which doesn't exist on any other services."

For that reason, YouTube considers its approach different from Netflix's reliance on traditional actors, and analysts say it could be the video service of choice for younger millennials and teenagers.

Alan Wolk, senior analyst at media consulting firm the Diffusion Group, said the "big if" will be whether kids can persuade their parents to pay.

"There's going to be millions of conversations about why do you need a subscription? Why can't you just deal with a few ads?" he said.

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

WASHINGTON -- LifeLock is paying $100 million to settle charges by federal regulators that it failed to take adequate measures to protect customers' personal data under a court order.

The Federal Trade Commission announced the settlement Thursday with the provider of identity-theft protection. The agency says it's the largest settlement it has won in this type of enforcement case. A Minneapolis class action lawyer is following this story closely.

The 2010 order by a federal court required LifeLock Inc. to secure customers' data, such as credit card and Social Security numbers, and to avoid false advertising claims. The order resulted from an action brought by the FTC and attorneys general in 35 states, alleging that LifeLock used false claims to promote its services. The company paid $12 million in that settlement, which went mostly to customer refunds, and agreed to make changes to its business practices.

The FTC said that LifeLock violated the order by failing to maintain "a comprehensive information-security program" and to avoid deceptive advertising.

LifeLock is based in Tempe, Arizona. Company co-founder and CEO Todd Davis used to put his own Social Security number on business cards and company trucks to advertise LifeLock's services.

LifeLock noted Thursday that it neither confirms nor denies the government's allegations under terms of the new settlement. Once it is approved by the court, the settlement will help bring to a close the FTC case as well as a class-action lawsuit, the company said. A Newark class action attorney is reviewing the details of this case.

"The allegations raised by the FTC are related to advertisements that we no longer run and policies that are no longer in place," LifeLock said in a statement. "The settlement does not require us to change any of our current products or practices. Furthermore, there is no evidence that LifeLock has ever had any of its customers' data stolen, and the FTC did not allege otherwise."

In the latest action, the FTC alleged that LifeLock violated the 2010 order in 2012-14. For example, the company falsely advertised that it would send alerts to customers "as soon as" it saw signs of possible identity theft, the agency said.

Of the $100 million LifeLock is paying consumers, $68 million may be used to reimburse consumers for fees paid to LifeLock under the class-action suit. The remaining $32 million will go to the FTC and also could be used to reimburse customers as ordered by any of the state attorneys general who participated in the action. An Atlanta class action lawyer provides legal counsel in many types of class action suits.

LifeLock's shares fell 30 cents, or 2.1 percent, to end at $13.99 in trading Thursday.

Suzanna Quintan's ex-husband bought a Lifelock account in her name, which let him monitor virtually everything she did in realtime, and then the company stonewalled and refused to help her shut down his access and figure out what he'd learned about her using it. A Detroit consumer lawyer represents clients in fraudulent credit transactions, hazardous or deceptively advertised products, and in fraudulent sales practices.

Lifelock's customer service reps tortured Quintan with contradictory messages, telling her she could, then couldn't, get access to her data. Then they told her it had been destroyed. Then that it would be available, but only to law enforcement. And when she got the cops involved, they stonewalled some more.

It wasn't until the Arizona Republic threatened to embarrass them in print that they gave her any help.

It's no wonder that Lifelock is on Consumer Reports' "Naughty list" for 2015 -- again.

Quintana's records show LifeLock allowed her ex-husband to track her new and existing accounts, credit score, credit reports, financial activity and public records. A Grand Rapids consumer attorney is reviewing the details of this case.

Through LifeLock's fraud-detection system, Quintana's ex-husband also would have had control over her financial activity and been asked to review each transaction or initiate a fraud investigation.

"They didn't listen to me. It's almost like they didn't believe me," Quintana said. "They did not want to admit what they'd done. Since they are an identity-protection company, it was not in their best interest to admit my identity wasn't protected. They tried to shift the blame to me." A Charleston consumer lawyer is following this story closely.

A LifeLock executive on Nov. 9 said the company was conducting a comprehensive review of procedures to ensure better protection for spouses and to work with law enforcement in a timely and effective manner.